Perry Hall: Sonified, Synesthesia And Livepaintings

Contemporary discourse in architecture and design reflects upon the increasing ability to engage the lively part of matter and train this sensibility as not only a broader search for tools as much as an agenda of exploration -- that expands realms of thought on the concepts of information exchange, nature and construction, environment and interaction or collaboration. My own interest in it has been temporarily focused on the flickering merging of the concepts of matter and media through the lens of seeing information as currency in the natural world.

Artist Perry Hall's work has been fascinating architects for many years, and is the intriguing forefront of a new dimension of painting: In his paintings he has developed techniques that bring or set matter alive again on the canvas, allowing their space and time to be brought inward in a collaboration of discovery.

Located in Great Barrington, Mass., Hall's studio has been a witness and vessel of movements and concoctions that have set in motion such diverse media and material as oil, acrylic, ferrofluid, music, video, film, mobile devices, interactive facades that combine film, painting and architecture. In 2009, his proposal for an interactive painting mural for the new Miami Marlins Stadium in Miami, Fla. was shortlisted for a $2 million public art commission. His work includes the creation of documentary films as well as working as a painter and artist on special effects for feature motion pictures.

On the occasion of the launch of his most recent work -- Sonified, an iPhone/iPad app -- I conversed with Hall about his work and one of the hallmarks of his experience and of Sonified: synesthesia.

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Perry Hall: Sonified, Synesthesia and Livepaintings

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Material Study, 2006. Paint and ferrofluid filmed live on HD Video.
"Paint is mixed with a liquid that responds to magnetism (ferrofluid) and filmed while it transforms."

Material Study, 2006. Paint and ferrofluid filmed live on HD Video.

Material Study, 2006. Paint and ferrofluid filmed live on HD Video

Tidal Empire (Animist), 2011. Oil, acrylic and custom paints filmed live using a RED Epic digital cinema camera.
"Paint is 'corrupted' with a liquid that responds to magnetism (ferrofluid). When combined with an elaborate system of turbulence, a new vocabulary to paint with emerges."

Stills from Livepainting, 2002. Oil and acrylic paint filmed live on Digital Video.
"Convection cells of paint proliferate and spread in the creation of a time-based painting."

Livepainting, 2002. Oil and acrylic paint filmed live on Digital Video.
"For a brief moment in time, the paint 'comes to life' and is captured on film."

Stills from Abstract Crowd Behavior, 2002. Oil and acrylic paint filmed live on Digital Video.
"Oil paint roams autonomously across a surface while being filmed."

Abstract Crowd Behavior, 2002. Oil and acrylic paint filmed live on Digital Video.
"Painting becomes the bringing together of various dynamic forces that negotiate the territory of a canvas."

Stills from Cezanne's Apples (Growth and Decay), 2003. Oil and acrylic paint filmed live on Digital Video.
"A Cezanne still life is re-interpreted as the birth, growth and death cycle of actual oil paint."

Livepainting (Bodies), 2007. Oil and acrylic paints filmed live and composited with live model. HD Video.
"An experiment that integrates the shapes of paint flows with the shape of the human body. Strangely enough, it helped me think about how to integrate painting with architecture."

Decalcomania 11-81-07, 2007. Acrylic on gessoed panel / 60 cm x 126 cm. Detail.
"Intricate networks of interlocking lines and ridges resembling forms found in nature (bifurcating tree branches, river deltas,vein and capillary structures in the human body) comprise the vocabulary of Decalcomania. In a sense, its painting using a kind of 'physical fractal'."

Decalcomania Cycle Number 2, 2007. Acrylic on gessoed panel / 121.9 cm x 129.9 cm. Detail.
"I designed a set of custom four-foot long palette knives to make large scale Decalcomania paintings with; I use them to create a kind of circular 'trellis' that the paint can "grow" off of."

Sound Drawing 8-5-13, 2007. Sound waves moving through paint filmed live on HD Video.
"The Sound Drawings continue the pursuit of how to make paintings that move through time, and in the process sound, painting and film making are combined."

Sound Drawings Live at Conwy Castle, 2011. Sound Drawings (images of sound waves moving through paint) projected 200 feet in diameter across the exterior of Conwy Castle, Wales, UK as part of the Blinc Festival.
"It kind of felt like a medieval castle was dissolving in front of five thousand people."

Sound Drawing 1-8-09, 2009. Sound waves moving through paint filmed live on HD Video.
"I had met Louise Bourgeois in 2007, and had been thinking about eyes."

Dark Rose Number 1, 2007. Sound waves moving through paint and ferrofluid filmed live on HD Video.
"More experimentation: a hybrid of ferro-painting and Sound Drawing. Paint and ferrofluid are mixed, and sound waves are channeled through the paint."

Still from What Dreams May Come (1998). Directed by Vincent Ward. Polygram Interscope.
"Experimental paint tests-- video studies of how paint moves and flows-- were created with film maker John Gaeta to help steer the creative direction of the three dimensional "painted world" sequences for the film What Dreams May Come."

Still from Jackson Pollock: Beneath The Surface (2006). Directed by Perry Hall. The Williams College Museum of Art.
"While making an exhibition film on painter Jackson Pollock, I studied and photographed literally every square inch (both front and back) of his sixteen-foot long frieze format painting Number 2, 1949. Seen here are conservators with the painting."

Stills from Ice Cold Symmetry (2004). Oil and acrylic filmed live on Digital Video and digitally tiled.
"A simple video tiling technique was used on some of the Livepaintings for Chlorophilia, a short film made by The Discovery Channel that envisioned Los Angeles 100 years in the future."

Sonified seems like a great convergence of your work as an artist/painter, musician and film maker. What are the main ambitions of the project/app?

Synesthesia, a neurological condition in which a person's senses are connected in an atypical way -- such as "seeing music" or "hearing colors" -- both of which I experience, is the inspiration for Sonified. Sonified is a video camera that translates qualities of light and colors into sound, allowing you to hear what you're seeing. Its a way of using technology to put the experience of synesthesia into the mainstream; anyone with an iPhone or iPad can experience it.

The project combines film making and music; but by connecting seeing and hearing in this unique way, a new kind of sound-vision experience is created. For this first release, I recorded the sounds that the camera controls, but anyone could put their own selection of sounds into it, custom tailor their experience, and craft their own synesthesia. It points to becoming an architect of your own perception. And then there's the recording of these experiences -- a whole synesthetic cinema filmed with Sonified that is waiting to happen, as well as a new music format for artists who literally want to create visual music.

Sonified has just launched; I'm looking for the best development partners. But that's the concept.

A former work of yours -- sound drawings -- dealt with sound as an active operator in painting. Could you describe this work and what motivated its development?

I think of the sound drawings as paintings, or drawings, made from sound. So they're also inspired by synesthesia. The sound drawings are Sonified in reverse, so to speak: Sonified translates what you see into something you can hear; the sound drawings translate what you hear into something you can see.

I've been creating my own set of techniques for how to do this since 2000. Sound is channeled into a vessel containing different kinds of paint; by changing, or playing, the sound, the paint transforms and behaves in different ways. I film the images that emerge, and exhibit them as videos, drawings, photographs, but consider it a form of painting, as its solely about using the material of paint itself and what its capable of expressing. And its a completely analog technique, nothing digital is used,

Recently, one of the sound drawings was projected across the exterior of Conwy Castle, covering the entire 200-foot exterior of this medieval castle in Wales. As part of the Blinc festival, thousands of people saw/heard the Sound Drawing -- it was synesthesia shared amongst a large crowd. Also, a kind of painting that literally melded with architecture on a massive, immersive scale.

Your most recent work with ferrofluid, experiments with material self-organization and the position of the artist in this co-developing of the work. Which processes did you engage regarding selections of time and gesture in the making of this work as well as in the Livepaintings -- perhaps an apparent predecessor?

I'm a painter. But I will engage any kind of technique that allows me to make the paintings I want to create, regardless whether its film, sound, digital technology, what have you. I'll do and learn whatever it takes to make the painting. But I keep, at its core, the physical material of paint itself. Because it's beautiful, and smart.

In the case of the Livepaintings, I wanted to make time-based paintings, paintings that change over time and exhibit different kinds of behavior. I had to figure out how to get paint to become animate, and transform. Applying energy to paint is the way to do it. Redesigning, rethinking the composition of paint as a material, how to stimulate/integrate it with specific kinds of energy that allows it to exhibit some kind of intelligence-- signs of "living principles" within it, as Nicola Tesla put it. So I seek out unique, anomalous materials that respond to energy. Ferrofluid, which responds to magnetism, is a liquid I've worked with. In a recent project, Tidal Empire, ferrofluid is added to paint and a kind of mutant magnetic patterning emerges and is "painted" with a set of magnetic brushes.

Carla Leitão is an architect, designer and writer currently living, working and teaching Architecture in New York. Practice and academic works interests in ubiquity and intersection of new media and architecture.http://www.aumstudio.orghttp://www.ubiroom.net